Breukelaar, J S
Entry updated 3 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
(? - ) US-born teacher and author, in Australia from early adulthood; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Union Falls" in Fantasy Magazine for July 2011, soon becoming recognized for her adroit use of Horror in SF topoi. Collision (coll 2019) presents a gamut of her short work, which is also characterized by a forthright use of the materials of Fantastika to anatomize contemporary life: which she clearly sees as being at profound risk.
This sense of the imminence of Disaster governs her first novel, American Monster (2014), a gonzo rendering of Dystopian Near Future California, a Media Landscape destroyed by the internal contradictions of being an American state in a world larger than America: at the heart of which a female Frankenstein-Monster figure survives in anguish. Aletheia (2017) is supernatural horror. In The Bridge (2021), the escape of a Monster from a Religious cult is narrated through horror topoi mediated and transformed by the power of Story itself as expressed by an accompanying storyteller; the continuation of the complexly uttered tale immures its cast, as happens in the earlier American Monster, in the kind of Media Landscape Breukelaar finds a useful tool to anatomize the world. The Bridge won a Ditmar Award as best novel. [JC]
J S Breukelaar
born San Diego, California
works
- American Monster (Portland, Oregon: Lazy Fascist Press, 2014) [pb/]
- Aletheia (no place given: Crystal Lake Publishing, 2017) [pb/Ben Baldwin]
- The Bridge (Chicago, Illinois: Meerkat Press, 2021) [pb/]
collections and stories
- Collision (Atlanta, Georgia : Meerkat Press, 2019) [coll: pb/]
links
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